Short stay: Black baseball briefly had West Coast home

Nov. 19, 2012

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Members of the Oakland Larks from the West Coast Baseball Association. PHOTO: RICHARD HANGER STUDIOS. COLLECTION OF THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA, THE RICHARD T. DOBBINS COLLECTION, JUDITH P. DOBBINS

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Former Negro Leagues player Herbert Simpson is believed to be the last living member of the West Coast Baseball Association. PHOTO COURTESY OF NEGRO LEAGUES BASEBALL MUSEUM, INC.

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Former Oakland Larks pitcher Lionel Wilson went on to serve as Oakland's mayor. In this 1989 photo, he is shown with President George H. Bush as he examines the crushed I-880 Cypress structure in Oakland after a massive earthquake. CHARLES TASNADI, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Members of the Oakland Larks from the West Coast Baseball Association.PHOTO: RICHARD HANGER STUDIOS. COLLECTION OF THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA, THE RICHARD T. DOBBINS COLLECTION, JUDITH P. DOBBINS

With two World Series championships in three years, the San Francisco Giants are on top of baseball's world. Across the bay, the Oakland A's also reached the playoffs this year, while – closer to home – the Angels and Dodgers were in the race until the last few days of the season.

But nearly seven decades ago, teams from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland were part of a league that came and went so quickly that few fans today know it ever existed.

Those teams were the Los Angeles White Sox, San Francisco Sea Lions and Oakland Larks. Along with the Seattle Steelheads, Portland Rosebuds and Fresno Tigers, they made up the West Coast Baseball Association. It was the last of baseball's Negro leagues, created because organized baseball had banned black players, and the only one on the West Coast.

The league was organized, began play and failed, all in 1946, and it is believed only one man, 92-year-old Herbert Simpson, who was Seattle's first baseman, remains to recall its existence.

Leslie Heaphy, a history professor at Kent State University in Ohio, has written that the WCBA was created by Abe Saperstein, best known as founder of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. In her book, "The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960," Heaphy says Saperstein wanted "to show that black baseball still had life" after the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson in 1945.

Saperstein knew former Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens and persuaded him to get involved. Saperstein, Owens and other investors met in Oakland, outlined a budget and prepared an 18-week, 110-game schedule. They were goals that would not be realized.

Saperstein, who owned the Seattle franchise, was named president, and Owens, who had purchased the Portland team, was vice president.

Simpson, who lives in New Orleans, spent several years in minor-league baseball after the WCBA folded and the game integrated before retiring in 1954.

He described the quality of play in a telephone conversation last week as "very good." Why did it fail? "It just didn't hold up," he said. Simpson also said he has not been in contact with any former teammates or opponents for a long time. "I think everybody's gone," he said.

It was rare for mainstream newspapers to mention the league, but Bill Leiser, then sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, devoted a column to it. He quoted a member of the Sea Lions as saying: "We don't want anyone to watch us just because we are Negroes. We want to show you baseball that you'll want to pay to watch."

Black players had begun forming their own leagues in the 1920s. They thrived until Robinson and those who followed him brought about the integration of the game and an end to a need for separate leagues.

A 1993 Chronicle article says another key figure in the founding of the league was Berkeley resident Eddie Harris. He "and several members of the High Marine Social Club, an all-black organization in Berkeley ... formed the WCBA using the PCL (Pacific Coast League) as a model..." the Chronicle article claims.

Seemingly, one advantage was an agreement with the owners of Pacific Coast League teams in each city (only Fresno of the six cities did not have a PCL franchise) to use their stadiums when they were on the road. That agreement did not work out in practice as well as it had in theory.

Only one player went on to the major leagues after the color line had been broken. Sam Jones, a 20-year-old pitcher for the Oakland Larks, won 102 games in the big leagues.

Another Oakland pitcher also enjoyed a successful career, but not in baseball. Lionel Wilson served three terms as Oakland's mayor from 1977-91.

Despite early optimism, there were indications that things were being hurried. A Feb. 28 article in the Los Angeles Sentinel said, in part: "Schedules for the entire season haven't been arranged so far..."

When opening day arrived, two of the three scheduled doubleheaders were played in non-league cities. While Los Angeles opened in San Francisco's Seals Stadium, Oakland played Fresno in Stockton, and Seattle and Portland met in El Paso, Texas. Seattle had held its spring training in New Orleans, and it was common in those days for baseball teams, both white and black, to travel across the country in what were known as barnstorming tours. Still, the idea of two teams opening their season more than 1,600 miles from home could have seemed a bit out of the ordinary.

The non-home games continued into the second week when Oakland and Portland played at Sacramento. Fresno was at home to Los Angeles.

By early June, the Rosebuds were scheduled to play their first home game, in Lucky Beaver Stadium, where the PCL Beavers played. The Fresno team had been sold and moved to San Diego. The Tigers were scheduled to play Portland in Yakima, Wash., on June 2, then move to Lucky Beaver Stadium.

That June 4 Portland opener attracted a crowd of about 1,500. Seattle was making its home debut the same weekend. The Steelheads' first game was seen by 2,500 fans in Sick's Stadium, the home of the PCL Seattle Rainiers.

Whether Sick's Stadium was not always available or perhaps because Saperstein was accustomed to moving from town to town with his basketball team, the Steelheads also played home games in Tacoma, Spokane, Bellingham and Bremerton.

The difficulty in finding places to play continued into June. The White Sox and Sea Lions played a June 16 game at Gilmore Field, home of the Pacific Coast League's Hollywood Stars, rather than L.A.'s Wrigley Field.

By June 21, Oakland, at 14-3, had opened a 41/2-game lead over Seattle, which was 11-9. San Francisco was 12-12, followed by Portland at 7-9, San Diego at 4-6 and Los Angeles 3-12.

About the same time, another newspaper article raised what was meant to be a rhetorical question, asking, "Is the West Coast Baseball Association, Negro baseball's newest circuit, going to make the grade?" The answer, as the next paragraph explained, was, "YES."

Keeping records sometimes takes a lower priority when survival becomes the top priority, and this appears to have been the case with the WCBA.

There had been no mention of the schedule being divided into halves until a late June article that reported that the Oakland Larks were not likely to be caught "before the first part of the league race ends July 4."

On July 6, Seattle broke a 2-2 tie with four runs in the eighth inning to defeat San Diego. A newspaper story said "a fair-sized crowd that braved threatening weather apparently liked its first peek at the colored brand of professional ball, staying on to the finish."

That fair-sized crowd was witnessing one of the final games of the WCBA.

The league disbanded that month.

Why it failed isn't really clear. It was 66 years ago, everyone involved in its administration has almost certainly died, and it received little notice in the pre-TV news media. Wilson, the pitcher-turned-mayor, told the Chronicle years later that at least half the Larks' squad could have succeeded in organized ball.

It was also a time when black players were leaving to join the previously all-white leagues. Even the Negro National League, the largest black league, would be gone before the decade ended.

Still intact although the league was not, Seattle and Oakland embarked on a barnstorming trip through the Midwest, playing in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Herbert Simpson, the former Seattle first baseman, recalled his days in the league in a letter to a fan that read, in part, "They were always very nice to me, and I enjoyed every moment."

He told the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum that later that year, he was picked to join a team called the All Star Cincinnati Crescents that was on its way to Hawaii.

"...We played 16 games over a period of 25 days," Simpson told the museum. "We won 15 of those games before returning to San Francisco."

Barnstorming teams using the Oakland Larks name continued to play throughout the late '40s, and a semipro club that called itself the San Francisco Sea Lions was around as late as 1949, making headlines by signing a woman second baseman and touring as far away as Canada's Saskatchewan province.

By the time of the WCBA's demise, Robinson and Roy Campanella were working their way toward the majors, and several others weren't far behind. The days of segregated baseball were coming to an end.

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